Ford CFO: 'Stay Tuned Because The Second-Half Is Going To Be Very, Very Strong For Ford'

Ford Motor Company F reported worse than expected earnings on Tuesday. EPS for the company came at $0.23 on revenue of $33.9 billion, compared to EPS of $0.24 and revenue of $35.87 billion that it reported for the same quarter last year.

Robert Shanks, Ford CFO, was on CNBC recently to weigh in on the numbers and to discuss what Ford’s investors can look forward to.

Impact Of The Dollar

“Well, we didn’t miss on the pre-tax operating profit,” Shanks said. “We were pretty much in-line on that, there were two areas of difference, in terms of profitability on a after tax basis our tax rate was higher than what the average or the first [called] estimate was.”

He continued, “And on the top-line in terms of the revenue our revenue missed that was largely due to the fact that the Street didn’t fully appreciate the impact of the stronger dollar on the revenue of our international operations.”

Second-Half Is Going To Be Very Strong

Shanks was asked that keeping in mind the relative underperformance of Ford’s stock in past few years, can the company’s investors expect the stock to trade higher this year. He replied, “Well, I think they are going to love the balance of the year and particularly in the second half and that’s something that we talked about today. We also talked about it back in January.”

“Based on our product launch cadence particularly in the North America and Asia Pacific and new capacity that we have coming [under stream] at Asia Pacific at mid-year, we are really expecting the story of the year to be breakthrough, but built on very strong performance in the second-half. So, stay tuned because the second-half is going to be very, very strong for Ford,” Shanks concluded.